Data Enabled Design

Using data as creative material in the design process

Products have become more ‘data intensive’ and continuous access to data has become significantly easier, through a wide variety of API’s, open datasets and Internet of Things prototyping tools. The access to data has clearly influenced disciplines such as market intelligence and software optimization, but has hardly changed the design processes used to design for these data-intensive products.

Sander Bogers and Janne van Kollenburg dedicated their PhD to explore: “How can we use data as creative material in the design process?” Through a series of innovation projects, executed at Philips Design, the definition, development and implementation of Data-enabled Design is iteratively advanced. The aim of this approach is to, together with end-users, unravel the relevance, potential and pitfalls of data in a specific context to design concepts that resonate.

Data-enabled design is an approach in which detailed data from sensor-equipped probes, gathered in the wild, is used as creative design material that can inspire and inform the design process [1]. In this process we depart from contextual insights through a variety of data collectors (both qualitative and quantitative) that we then use to inform new design interventions. Thereby we emphasize a continuous process of remote exploration, through data-enabled remote updates, insights and design interventions.

Van Kollenburg, J., Deckers, E., Gardien, P., Hummels, C. 2015. People research for eco-system propositions: a theoretical framework towards the future of interaction design. In Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Design and Semantics of From and Movement (DeSForM), 102-110.